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Austria’s far-right Freedom party was on course to win a historic electoral victory on Sunday, in a result that will consolidate pro-Russian, anti-establishment forces in central Europe.
The FPÖ was projected to win 29.1 per cent of ballots cast, according to the first official estimate of the election, bolstering the claim of its firebrand leader Herbert Kickl to become chancellor. The projection — which includes exit polling data as well as analysis of counted votes — is usually a highly reliable predictor of the outcome.
The FPÖ — one of Europe’s longest-standing parties of the populist right, which has embraced increasingly hardline and extremist policies on immigration and the war in Ukraine in recent years — has never come first in a national election before.
The figure is an even better result for the FPÖ than its leaders and those of Austria’s other political parties had expected, with many having assumed that undecided voters would turn away from the party at the ballot box, preferring to support the more moderate conservative People’s party, which governs in coalition with the Greens.
Instead, the People’s party was projected to win just 26.2 per cent. The Social Democrats were on track to secure just 20.4 per cent, their worst-ever result.